The Golden Age Isn’t Over

Brian Cowan is associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University. He is the author of "The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse."

Updated March 9, 2011, 11:11 PM

I love coffee, and I have gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain good coffee. When I was a graduate student in the early 1990s, I would have Starbucks send me their premium roasted whole beans from Seattle to Princeton, N.J. because I couldn’t find any decent coffee on the east coast at the time. Of course, all of that changed very quickly as the Starbucks empire expanded eastwards. By the late 1990s, I had no trouble finding great coffee even in England.

The Ottoman coffeehouses of the 16th century were the model for similar drinking houses throughout Europe in the later 17th century.

While it seems like coffee has always been with us, it has been around for less than 600 years and has been commonly consumed for little more than about 300 hundred years. In world historical terms, this is a very short history indeed. But what an influence this magical bean has had in those last three centuries.

The introduction of coffee was perhaps the Ottoman Empire’s greatest gift to western civilization. The Ottoman coffeehouses of the 16th century provided a template for similar drinking houses throughout Europe in the later 17th century. By 1700, there were coffeehouses in most major western and central European cities. In the 18th century, the global expansion of the British and other European empires brought coffee drinking to the Americas and introduced, or sometimes reintroduced, it to many Asians in an Europeanized form. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the development of coffee as a major cash crop in Latin America, Africa and southeast Asia.

The caffeine in coffee has to be one of the most efficient and pleasant ways to obtain the mild stimulation that has surely been part of the secret to its popularity. Yet since the rise of coffeehouse culture in late 17th century Europe, commentators have sprung up to lament its decline and pronounce the end of the golden age of coffee. They have always been wrong. New trends in coffee drinking and new kinds of cafes have always emerged to satisfy our unquenchable thirst for coffee.